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Behavioral economics & human decision making

Find out what makes people tick and understand what drives behaviors such as spending and saving money, and why the latter is so difficult for most people.

4 courses

Courses in this collection:

1

The Psychology of Money Decisions

The shortcuts that we use when making financial decisions

Why do we behave the way we do when it comes to financial decisions?

Why do we spend when we should be saving?

Why do we throw good money after bad?

And why do we make poor choices as consumers?

Our aim with this course is to help you understand a little bit better how humans generally make decisions about money and the biases that are at play that cause the disconnect between our intentions and our actual behaviors.

This is not a how-to guide, but a why-guide. Once you understand why certain money decisions are made a certain way, we’ll leave it to you to decide whether something needs to change.

We’re not going to teach you how to amass wealth or touch upon the socio-economical implications of rising inequality.

In our experience at Irrational Labs, we find that it’s the companies trying to help consumers become happier, healthier and wealthier that make the most mistakes valuing their products. This course will help you better understand these mistakes and how to avoid them.

Have you ever been curious about questions such as:

Why people get so excited about buying things that are in short supply?

What causes promotions to drive short-term spikes in sales yet become counterproductive over time?

When can offering a product for free actually be bad for the customer?

In 22 short and fun lessons, you will learn the answers to these questions as you are introduced to key concepts from the field of behavioral economics. You will get examples and exercises to help you take what you’ve learned and apply it to the pricing and promotions of different products and services.

This course is primarily for product managers, designers and creators of products and services that are helping improve people’s well-being.

If you choose to apply any of these insights within your company, we ask that you answer one question before making any changes: “Will this make people better off?’ This simple rule of thumb will help ensure you’re making changes that improve your customer’s bottom line as well as your company’s.

Human beings are prone to pay most attention to information that confirms, rather than goes against, their worldview. Because of this, most of us have a hard time predicting the future, doing non-biased research and evaluating choices in an objective way.

If you enjoy making predictions, or you work in a field that requires research and trend analysis, this course is for you. You will learn about some common cognitive biases and get a step-by-step guide on how to think and act in order to make more informed decisions and predictions.

Join more than 7000 product developers and marketers in taking this free bite-sized course!---

“When we understand human behavior, we can build and sell products that change lives.”

This course is for people who create and build products and services that change behavior for the good. If you are a product manager, designer or marketer, you are also a choice architect. By understanding human behavior, you can help your users/customers and humans, in general, make better decisions.

In 22 short, fun and information-packed lessons you will get a brief introduction to interesting research findings from the field behavioral economics. You’ll also get examples on how to best apply these findings to your product or service.